A few words about finish. Don't discount buying an older glider with gel coat in fairly good but far from perfect condition. Until I had my LS-6 refinished in poly a few years ago, I would spend a couple of afternoons at the beginning of every season touching up the wings with patches of fresh gel coat from my friendly TAP plastics distributor. Crazed areas yield fairly easily to sanding followed by brushing on fresh gel coat followed by wet and dry sanding down to 1000 or 1200 grit.

If you're accustomed to hand work, it's not a hard job. I doubt that I ever spent more than ten hours at it, probably less. The patches came out beautifully fair and smooth, although they were visible (adding the correct amount of yellow tint is tricky), and I never noticed any loss of performance with the glider.

However, if you're not accustomed to hand work I wouldn't recommend this -- or at least practice on a spare piece of fiberglass until you get it right!